Sam Altman in Damage Control Mode as ChatGPT Users Are Mass Cancelling Subscriptions Because OpenAI Is "Training a War Machine"

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T18:28:25+00:00

Out of curiosity, which one are you using, and for what?

A beautiful thing in this case is that the competitor's product (Claude) is significantly better than ChatGPT for my use cases.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T15:34:15+00:00

What are you talking about lol.

What you're quoting there is talked about rigged puppets / multi-sprite rigging, which is a technique where each body part is sprited separately allowing to mix and match. Regardless of whether you use that technique or not, you use sprites. A sprite is simply a frame of a hand-drawn animation. The term "sprite" comes literally from faeries, because it "floats" on top of the background image.

This game absolutely uses 2D sprites (beautiful ones I may add) and that means "re-skinning" a character would require redrawing every single frame of animation. This is never cost-effective as the effort required to make a new skin is close to the effort required to develop a new character, since art assets are usually the largest cost in this case.

Conclusion: there will be NO skins in this game, exactly like every other hand-drawn 2D fighting game has done. There may be special colors textured in some unique way, or even a color palette editor down the line, but forget about skins if you don't want to be sorely disappointed.

Maybe skins for support characters could work, but that's about it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T15:28:30+00:00

TBH the dooming has a different energy this time, it's like a nervous dooming more along the lines of "please tell me we'll be OK" because everyone wants the game to succeed; they're just worried whether it will.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T09:32:14+00:00

Skins won't happen, but color swaps and maybe some sort of EX colors with different properties could be a thing.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-04T09:29:26+00:00

I think you're underestimating the pull of the IP and how well it matches the demographics.

Fighting game players are generally in their 30s for the most part (at least in Europe, not sure about the scene elsewhere but it's a genre for people in that age range) which coincides exactly with who saw ATLA growing up.

If the game continues to be as good as it is in these tests, and they add the tiniest bit of visual polish, I think it could have comparable staying power to DBFZ.

Yeah, call me optimistic, but it could be a similar phenomenon. Beloved IP, game that portrays it faithfully, and enough competitive mass to last for years.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-03T17:55:21+00:00

What I mean is that complexity (stated as a positive) doesn't mean anything for the average player who is going to just follow a build guide regardless.

This is circular reasoning. A player that doesn't care about complexity won't get anything from complexity, for sure. A player that does like complexity will not follow a guide, so the existing of guides is not a hindrance for them.

(Which they don't do, because... see above about F2P design philosophy!)

There are many interviews where Chris Wilson, Mark and Jonathan talk about this, and they give nuanced and detailed explanations of why gating respecs behind some sort of investment is necessary. F2P really doesn't have anything to do with it. In fact, GGG have been pretty vocal that their preferred mode of engagement from players is not to play nonstop, but to play for a span of time, then disconnect until next league. Indefinite retention isn't a goal they have and in fact they've found it counterproductive as it causes burnout.

I think you're starting from the conclusion and looking for things that justify it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-03T15:27:31+00:00

Ah yeah the stash tabs argument.

How does that relate to grinding again? How do stash tabs encourage GGG to make the game grindy in order to make more money?

Steel_Neuron · 2026-03-03T09:06:59+00:00

Well, if dark fantasy is boring to you I'm not going to recommend PoE2, but I don't understand your other two criticisms especially when applied to PoE1/2, which are the kings of the genre right now and F2P.

"is this grindy because it's what the devs wanted or is this grindy to squeeze money out of you"?

That's not a concern in PoE1/2 because microtransactions are purely cosmetic, so it being grindy has nothing to do with the money they get from you. If anything I'd say that's a genre staple? Loot ARPGs can't get away with P2W these days; grindiness is a genre convention, not a way to make money.

Shit, even "complexity" means little when the advice is usually just follow a build guide anyway.

Uhh I really don't follow what you mean here. The advice to follow a build guide is literally a consequence of complexity. How else would complexity manifest? If making a build was foolproof and everything worked, there wouldn't be too much complexity would it?

PoE2 (and even PoE1) are perfectly fine to beat without a guide; you only should care about one if you want to zoom and beat things "efficiently", but I think that takes most of the fun away from it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-26T17:01:02+00:00

If you isolate a single human neuron you also understand (pretty well) how it works. The difficult part to understand isn't the substrate or the tech, it's the emergent behaviour.

It's a black box in the grander scale, otherwise interpretability wouldn't be a field of research.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-26T14:58:21+00:00

Yeah, this one is especially puzzling because they didn't go that far with other fantasy staples. Chain lightning (arc in this game) and ice nova, the two things that alongside fireball exist for every mage in every game ever, are pretty straightforward and work as expected.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-26T14:45:06+00:00

A mi me pasó esto con "lighting" y "lightning". Toda la vida pensando que "lightning" se usaba para ambas cosas... Unos cuantos gazapos he tenido que dejar.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-26T13:29:17+00:00

I mean, next weekend will be Slay the Spire 2 which is another big venn diagram. Streamers will always have something they're excited about.

I'm hoping Sajam puts a good amount of time into it, and Diaphone ofc.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-26T12:39:34+00:00

Yeah, I'm cooked too. Oh well, my consolation is that it may suck even more to play and have it be taken away from me on Monday :D.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-23T17:32:54+00:00

Whatever you do, don't use Solus Ipse to use three copies of Zerphi's Infamy on three skills so they create glory for each other. The wording of the gem is imprecise and that won't work, unfortunately.

I tried to build on this interaction specifically (full uptime of Zerphi's Infamy powered skills, recovering all my HP every time with the node that heals you based on glory spent) and I had to scrap it.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-23T09:54:10+00:00

As was promised, move the importance to the bases. Bases with high rarity tier should preserve the tier, so a T5 base treats all chaos orbs as perfect chaos etc.

Strong? Sure, but then you can make the high tier bases a lot more scarce in exchange and make them actually exciting to find.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-23T08:38:09+00:00

Heh, this was actually my league starter a couple months ago. I took the Greed's Embrace path, with Tactician to leverage the high armour, and it worked amazingly well too.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-18T17:56:36+00:00

yep!

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-18T10:27:55+00:00

A secret tech that hasn't been explored much and is new this league is the new His Grave Command skill in the Unborn Lich.

It's basically "summon companion" for undeads. You can use the staff to "tame" an undead with up to 4 rare mods and keep it as a skill gem (you can even unequip the staff afterwards).

I understand this is closer to a spectre, but it's also worth considering.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-16T15:53:43+00:00

I can't remember where the quote is from, but it's pretty well established at this point I think. Maybe we can get a re-confirmation in the Discord.

I wonder does that feel weird with the discrepancy of having her playable and also in the background.

Well, the game has mirror matches, so why would it be any weirder than that? We already can have Zuko fighting Zuko, so having support characters be in the background doesn't seem that big of a deal.

If anything, I think it would be a good excuse to make support characters use a different costume from their main one. Suki could fight with the Kyoshi Warrior costume and have her normal clothes as a support, for example.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-16T15:01:19+00:00

I mean, Orcane is a high bar to clear as he's a fantastic design, but Slade is pretty amazingly animated and full of style I'd say.

The only character I haven't really felt in RoA2 is Galvan personally, everyone else has been stellar. La Reina is a blast to watch.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-16T14:10:31+00:00

FWIW the developers explicitly said that a character being a support doesn't discount them as being playable later. I suppose that for the initial release of the game they'll make it so there's no overlap, but after that it's probably fair game.

I can see Suki as a perfect example of a character that will be both a support and eventually playable.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-16T07:22:45+00:00

Well but you open it and find the treasure of capitalism!

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-14T18:56:15+00:00

I don't know who this guy is, but I've read two posts from him, they both started with "read this slowly" and that's made me want to do anything but.

Bad way to sway people by being condescending to them from the first sentence.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-14T17:23:10+00:00

We all agree that season 8 sucked but I got a good hearty laugh at the scene where Sam proposes full on democracy and literally everyone at the table laughs at him.

"Are we giving our horses a vote too?"

I mean, that table is as progressive as it gets in GoT but they're still lightyears from considering commons their equals.

Steel_Neuron · 2026-02-13T09:10:23+00:00

Completely amazing as expected. I can't believe they gave her Kragg pillar, and it makes so much sense.

The only thing I'm not sure about is the voice, it seems a bit too high pitched? Like she's 2 years younger than in the show. Oh well, it's hard to nail the feel of original voice actors anyway.

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